international-entertainment

Netflix is ending its subscriber-based DVD rental service

29Sep

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Technology

Netflix is ending its subscriber-based DVD rental service

CNN — Netflix will send out its last red envelope on Friday, marking an end to 25 years of mailing DVDs to members. The company announced earlier this year it is shutting down its DVD-by-mail service, 16 years after it gradually shifted its focus to streaming content online. Netflix will continue to accept returns of customers’ remaining DVDs until October 27. Introduced in 1998 when Netflix first launched, the DVD service promised an easier rental experience than having to drive to the nearest Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. The red envelopes, which have long been synonymous with Netflix itself, littered homes and dorm rooms across the country. Although the idea of receiving a DVD in...

Chinese artists boycott big social media platform over AI-generated images

29Sep

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Technology

Chinese artists boycott big social media platform over AI-generated images

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Hong Kong CNN — Artists across China are boycotting one of the country’s biggest social media platforms over complaints about its AI image generation tool. The controversy began in August when an illustrator who goes by the name Snow Fish accused the privately owned social media site Xiaohongshu of using her work to train its AI tool, Trik AI, without her knowledge or permission. Trik AI specializes in generating digital art in the style of traditional Chinese paintings; it is still undergoing testing and has not yet been formally launche...

Britain set to approve amended Microsoft-Activision deal

22Sep

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Technology

Britain set to approve amended Microsoft-Activision deal

CNN — Microsoft’s proposed multibillion-dollar purchase of Activision Blizzard took a step closer to fruition on Friday as UK regulators said an amended version of the deal is likely to resolve their concerns over the acquisition. In a statement, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said that changes Microsoft (MSFT) put forward — involving the sale of Activision’s cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft, a competitor — could help ensure that the nascent cloud gaming industry remains competitive. Microsoft (MSFT) announced the deal in early 2022, but it was blocked in April by the UK competition regulator. Regulators had worried that Microsoft’s control over popular Activision (ATVI)...

21Sep

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Technology

George R. R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and other famous writers join Authors Guild in class action lawsuit against OpenAI

New York CNN — A group of famous fiction writers joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action suit against OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company’s technology is illegally using their copyrighted work. The complaint claims that OpenAI, the company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, is copying famous works in acts of “flagrant and harmful” copyright infringement and feeding manuscripts into algorithms to help train systems on how to create more human-like text responses. George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 prominent authors who joined the suit led by the Authors Guild, a professional organization that protects writers’ rights. Filed in the Souther...

17Sep

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Technology

Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk

CNN — “You’ll never be successful,” Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education. That’s one of the scenes Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who ever lived. The biography allows readers new glimpses into the private life of the entrepreneur who popularized electric vehicles for the masses and landed rocket boosters hurtling back to Earth so they could be reused. But Musk’s public statements and actions have become increasingly unhinged, filing and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that fight hate speech and allowing some of the in...

Illinois passes a law that requires parents to compensate child influencers

16Aug

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Technology

Illinois passes a law that requires parents to compensate child influencers

CNN — When 16-year-old Shreya Nallamothu from Normal, Illinois, scrolled through social media platforms to pass time during the pandemic, she became increasingly frustrated with the number of children she saw featured in family vlogs. She recalled the many home videos her parents filmed of herself and her sister over the years: taking their first steps, going to school and other “embarrassing stuff.” “I’m so glad those videos stayed in the family,” she said. “It made me realize family vlogging is putting very private and intimate moments onto the internet.” She said reminders and lectures from her parents about how everything is permanent online intensified her reaction to the videos...

X to auction off old Twitter items — everything from desk chairs to a rendering of Ellen DeGeneres’ 2014 Oscar Selfie

13Aug

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Technology

X to auction off old Twitter items — everything from desk chairs to a rendering of Ellen DeGeneres’ 2014 Oscar Selfie

New York CNN — Twitter has officially rebranded as X — so owner Elon Musk is holding a giant garage sale to purge the company’s HQ of remnants of the past. Items up for auction range from a standard desk chair to a large bird cage welded with a Twitter logo bird and everything in between. Since buying Twitter less than a year ago, Musk has worked to remake the social media site. He’s laid off most of the company’s employees, instituted a paywall and eliminated most account authentication, among other changes. Interested buyers can browse through numerous “#” and “@”statues, paintings of Ellen DeGeneres’ viral 2014 Oscar selfie and Barack Obama celebrating his reelection, a reconstruct...

12Aug

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Technology

New tools aim to protect art and images from AI’s grasp

CNN — For months, Eveline Fröhlich, a visual artist based in Stuttgart, Germany, has been feeling “helpless” as she watched the rise of new artificial intelligence tools that threaten to put human artists out of work. Adding insult to injury is the fact that many of these AI models have been trained off of the work of human artists by quietly scraping images of their artwork from the internet without consent or compensation. “It all felt very doom and gloomy for me,” said Fröhlich, who makes a living selling prints and illustrating book and album covers. “We’ve never been asked if we’re okay with our pictures being used, ever,” she added. “It was just like, ‘This is mine now, it’s o...